PANTHEON WORK
The logical mind is a powerful tool for breaking down systems into parts and analyzing their connections. But the brain has another, even more powerful tool: the narrative mind, which works with stories, archetypes, and metaphors to represent systems more complex and ambiguous than logic can handle. While the logical mind evolved to reason about mechanical systems—tool-making, weapons design, sewing, pottery-making, and so forth—the narrative mind evolved to reason about social systems—families, farm collectives, political coalitions, war parties, healing circles, and all the complex webs of allegiance, antagonism, and mutual dependence that arise within and between them.
From a certain lens, of course, the brain is a mechanical system: a massive neural circuit wired together with axons and synapses. What we are gradually coming to understand is that the brain is also a social system: a community of "semi-independent agents," as neuroscientist and famed split-brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga puts it. Cutting-edge new psychotherapeutic models like Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy have discovered beneath the surface of the apparently unified mind a rich multiplicity of subpersonalities or "parts" with different strengths, different wounds, different perspectives on the world, and different relationships with each other.
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Pantheon Work is an IFS-informed method for using your powerful narrative mind to heal the fractured community inside you and galvanize it into unanimous action toward your goals. Using the age-old narrative components of myth, metaphor, and archetype that have bound communities together since the dawn of our species, it can resolve long-standing conflicts between parts of you that have long been at war, free stuck parts of you from deep pain, and give parts of you that lack confidence a clear, believable vision of the power within them and the path to claiming it.
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For interested clients, I use Pantheon Work as part of my coaching practice. If you would like to explore Pantheon Work on your own or with an intimate partner, an interactive deck of cards with an extensive included guidebook, the Pantheon Deck, is available for purchase.
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Aspect Cards
Our calm, confident, compassionate true Self has many different archetypal Aspects, powerful built-in capacities that are available to each of us if we can clear out our negative projections of that Aspect of us and open ourselves to a clear vision of its beauty.
Part Cards (blank--fill yourself!)
Our young, wounded parts are stuck carrying the pain of the past and enacting the survival strategies that served us then but no longer serve us now. Each part is a glorious Aspect in the making but bears the unique trace of its difficult journey through life.
Ritual Cards
Rituals create the narrative backbone for deep change. To enable parts to release themselves from the knots of the past and grow toward the Aspects they dream of being, it is essential to create safe ritual spaces within which transformation can occur.